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t-minus: Instant prelaunch page for your Rails3 app

Let’s say you want to generate some buzz for your app as you develop. It would be nice to have a splash page to collect email signups and then quickly take down when the site is ready.

If you’re running Rails 3, John Grimes has made it a snap with T-minus, a Rails engine that provides a splash page and signup form. The app collects email signups and even has Campaign Monitor integration built-in.

To get started, add T-minus to your Gemfile

gem "t-minus"

… and then bundle:install.

Now you can run the supplied generator:

rails generate t_minus:install

Edit your database settings in the generated config/prelaunch_config.yml and then migrate up:

rake db:migrate

If you want to customize the model or controller, you can generate those, too, to override the supplied gem versions:

rails generate t_minus:controller
rails generate t_minus:model

When your app is finally ready for primetime, simply set active to false in config/prelaunch_config.yml.